Monthly Archives: April 2015

well they have started, they know who they are , and frankly i am amazed how quickly they took the bait ,hook ,line, and sinker . they are so easily baited. I knew if I SAID UK ELECTION ,NOT YOUR BUSINESS RUSSELL BLAND, GREAT GUY, POSSIBLE LABOUR SUPPORTER .YOUR NOT BRITISH ,SO STAY OUT .It would jump in up to its neck and it did, well it could not see the red light flashing saying fools rush in where angels fear to tread, Ah it,s sort of sweet how nieve it is you got to have a soft spot for a dumb animal have you not ?

So please say what you want about the uk election, hmm that means your not going to then?So I know do not say anything about the uk election. OOH DEAR, YOUR FCUKED IF YOU DO AND YOUR FCUKED IF YOU DON,T NOW !!!HA HA HA HA HA.

UN says many of these stories have been grossly distorted and some have been outright fabrications.

BRITISH tabloid editors have never struck me as a particularly reflective and thoughtful breed of humanity, so I doubt they will be plunged into a mood of remorseful self-analysis by the very strongly-worded suggestion from the United Nations High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein that there is a connection between their skewed coverage of immigration and asylum and the horrors now taking place in the Mediterranean.

It is far more likely that they, their journalists and many of their readers will scoff at the impudence of some jumped-up Johnny Foreigner with an unpronouncable name who is probably a Muslim to boot having the temerity to criticize their courageous attempts to have a ‘debate’ about immigration and shrug off the politically correct shackles imposed on them by muesli-eating liberals from Hampstead.

That is what they’re like, and to our great shame, that is what they are making us like too. Because it is really very difficult to argue with Mr Al-Hussein’s condemnation of the ‘ vicious cycle of vilification, intolerance and politicization of migrants’ that is ‘not only sapping compassion for the thousands of people fleeing conflict, human rights violations and economic deprivation who are drowning in the Mediterranean’ and which has also ‘skewed the EU response to the crisis.’

These are very strong words from an organization that is normally far more diplomatic and polite. The immediate object of these complaints was Katie Hopkins’ ‘cockroach’ comments, which Mr Al-Hussein sees as a manifestation of a larger phenomenon in which:

‘Asylum seekers and migrants have, day after day, for years on end, been linked to rape, murder, diseases such as HIV and TB, theft, and almost every conceivable crime and misdemeanour imaginable in front-page articles and two-page spreads, in cartoons, editorials, even on the sports pages of almost all the UK’s national tabloid newspapers.’

Many of these stories, as the Commissioner pointed out, ‘ have been grossly distorted and some have been outright fabrications. Elsewhere in Europe, as well as in other countries, there has been a similar process of demonization taking place, but usually led by extremist political parties or demagogues rather than extremist media.’

This is horribly and depressingly accurate. One of the great fantasies of the British right is that they are ‘not allowed’ to have a ‘debate’ about immigration, but there has never been a time in my lifetime when the right has not talked about it, and it has always done so in negative and often grossly offensive terms.

Even as a child when I came back to the UK from the West Indies in 1967, I was shocked by the racism oozing from the front pages of the tabloids, whether it was aimed at Enoch Powell’s ‘picanninies’, Ugandan Asians, or the ‘black mugger’ of the 1970s or the ‘people with a different culture’ who Margaret Thatcher said were ‘swamping’ Britain in the 1980s.

The idea that all this miraculously stopped, and that the UK suddenly became a ‘post-racial’ society that was comfortable with immigration and with its new ‘rainbow’ multicultural identity was always something of an overstatement. Of course progress has been made since the days when Tories could fight election campaigns under the slogan ‘vote Labour if you want a nigger for a neighbor’, but there has always been a solid section of the white British public that has bitterly resented having to share the UK with foreigners of any kind, and dark-skinned foreigners in particular.

Beginning roughly in the early 90s, anti-immigrant rhetoric shifted away from earlier narratives about ‘race’ and ‘culture’ and began to develop a seemingly racially-neutral narrative about ‘numbers.’ This ‘numbers’ discourse was focused primarily on asylum seekers. Shamelessly, dishonestly, and relentlessly, without even the pretence of trying to understand the phenomenon of asylum or explain its causes and its complexities, the British media disseminated an image of asylum seekers as parasites and liars flooding into the country and ‘abusing’ our generosity because they regarded Britain as a ‘soft touch.’

Following the ‘war on terror’ the discourse shifted again, merging Islamphobic fantasies of terror cells and a Muslim cultural/religious takeover of British society with xenophobic outrage against Eastern European immigrants who refused to integrate while they ‘took our jobs and services’ and created Polish and Rumanian ghettoes etc.

Whatever they did, immigrants couldn’t win. If they came here ‘legally’ they were part of the phenomenon of ‘mass immigration.’ If they worked hard, they were exploiting us by taking jobs for low wages, even if they were being exploited themselves or doing jobs that British citizens wouldn’t do. If they sent their children to school they were undermining the education of our children. If they lived in a house they were stealing a house from ‘our people.’

Whatever they did they always had an unfair advantage over us. They were always taking, usurping, queue-jumping, and undermining. As for those who came here ‘without permission’ or ended up becoming ‘failed asylum seekers’, they were the worst of all; criminal parasites living the life of Riley all over the country at the expense of ‘our people’ or using the Human Rights Act to escape deportation for crimes they’d already been punished for.

Whoever they were, they were bad, and taking advantage of our goodness, and there were always too many of them, in a country that was ‘full’ and which needed to put ‘our people first.’ And anyone who said that this kind of talk was unfair, dangerous, and maybe xenophobic and racist hatemongering to boot, why they were just trying to stifle ‘debate’ and smother the public’s ‘concerns.’

Out of those decades of bile, words like ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘migrant’ became pejorative terms of abuse onto which tabloids hung their prejudices and fanned the prejudices of their readers, and politicians pandered to them and fed them further.

The result, as Mr Al-Hussein pointed out, is that we now have a country where a columnist in a major newspaper can use the kind of language used by Nazis and Rwandan genocidaires to describe people drowning in the Mediterranean. It’s a country where sick men and women who need medical treatment are now dyingbecause they are afraid to seek it in case they are deported, a country whose rancid bitterness and fury towards immigrants is now transforming ideas and concepts that were once associated with fascism and Nazism into jokey blokey everyday discourse.

Katie Hopkins used that language because in her dim, grasping, attention-seeking way, she recognized that she lived in a country where such talk has now become acceptable and can even appear to be a kind of ‘common sense.’

The British media bears a huge responsibility for this outcome. As the High Commissioner pointed out, the demonisation of migrants and asylum seekers also takes place in other European countries ‘ but usually led by extremist political parties or demagogues rather than extremist media.’

He is absolutely right. An extremist media is what we have got, and it is helping to create an extremist society drugged by fear, loathing and resentment that is in danger of losing its own humanity even as it denies the humanity of the men and women who want to come here.

SEAN HANNITY IS HE IRISH?was he a radio jock before he joined fox news?does he look like a cartoon character out of toy story?Is he mr Marella in a mask ? we think so, THOUGH THAT IS JUST OUR OPINION.WHAT DO YOU THINK .

In the land of Twitter Russell Brand goes by the name of @rustyrockets. I wonder if that self deprecating metaphor might be better applied to those parts of the press that take such delight in saying how awful and how irrelevant to real debate he is. For they are the ones misfiring left right and centre, fighting for their survival, gasping to hold on to influence even as they feel it slipping away, while someone like Brand effortlessly makes the weather form around him.

Now I loathe the celebrity culture more than most. Reality TV, Simon Cowell Inc, crap magazines telling me A list Celeb A shared a bed with B list Celeb B, while C List Celebs C and D have new tattoos on their arse are of zero interest to me. But Brand is a celeb with a difference. He has political antennae, something close to a worldview, and he connects with groups of people and motivates people in a way that few politicians seem able to.

I first became aware of him many years ago when my daughter told me she and her friends were hanging around his house, round the corner from ours, after school. He then moved away but came back into our lives when, at a time he was getting big and the press were starting to turn him into a Public Enemy, a mutual friend called me and asked if I would see him to discuss how to deal with newspapers which are hellbent on hate and destruction.

Readily I did so, and told him the story of a conversation John Prescott and I had around 1999 and 2000 when we realised we had both reached a position of genuinely not caring what newspapers thought or said about us. I cared what they said about Tony Blair and the government, but only if it prevented us from doing the things we wanted to, and my own profile, good or bad, did not really fall into that category. Once I stopped giving a damn what they said, it was liberating. It was the beginning of an approach rooted in the idea that all you can control is what you say and do, not what others say and do about it. This is a trend now accelerated by social media in which Brand is something of a star.

I have no idea if Brand adopted a changed approach thereafter but he has always struck me as someone with a very good sense of who he is, what he wants to achieve, and how. Not many people can claim to be actors, writers, comedians and activists, and very good at all of it, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

There is another reason I am drawn to him and that is his experience of, and shared interest in, mental illness, in his case all manner of damaging addictive behaviours.

Like Ed Miliband, I have crossed the Brand threshold of his East London home. It is a lot funkier than the NW3 place that used to attract my daughter and her friends. Like Ed, I sat down with him and discussed politics. He was particularly keen to have a go at me about Iraq, and TB’s motivations. I was particularly keen to challenge him on his view, expressed when he was interviewed by – and more than held his own with – Jeremy Paxman, that voting made no difference. He didn’t change my mind about TB. I think I may have changed his about voting because afterwards I started to notice him changing his tune to the point of saying he wished he hadn’t said that, but he stood by everything else.

Since then, out on the speaking circuit, I have found myself mentioning Brand fairly often, saying I think he is wrong ever to advocate opting out of the democratic process, but right on a lot that he says about what politics and business have become. The need for revolution as it is commonly understood may be overstating things but that millions of people feel politics does not quite work, and our current economic model does not quite work, is surely beyond dispute. People like Brand can stir that up well, and actually to good not bad effect. Change can come in many ways, with many influencers along the way.

The interview we did was for a piece he was doing about the very subject of disengagement. In his last book, Revolution, he revealed that after I left his producer bollocked him – he thought Brand gave me too easy a ride because he was taken in by my shared love of a claret and blue football team and a shared zeal to improve understanding and services for mental illness.

But actually what I saw was someone who had certain strong principles and fixed views, but around them was fascinated by the views of others. We then did a slot for his online news chat, The Trews, where he looks at the newspapers with a guest. I was amazed how many people I bumped into in the next few weeks who had seen it. Any doubts about the reach of Brand were dispelled.

He also asked me if I thought he could persuade the party leaders to talk to him about politics. I was sceptical but told him how to make an approach to all of them. And I for one was glad when I heard Ed Miliband had said yes.

The papers today, rusty rockets firing and fulminating, are predictable in their outrage. But hidden within that outrage is a reality they cannot ignore – the story is on their front pages because what Ed Miliband says and does really really matters right now, because he may be a few days from being Prime Minister. And what Russell Brand says and does matters more than what the Sun, the Mail, theTelegraph, the Times, the Star and the Express are going to say on Election Day. Because anyone who has read them over the years could write it before they do. Predictable. Boring. Often nasty. Often wrong.

And if their readers believed it all, frankly Labour would be at around five per cent in the polls and Miliband’s ratings hovering just above the toilet. Just as if Scotland had voted in the referendum according to press coverage, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon would now be nothing more than footnotes of recent years rather than change-makers.

It is neither good nor bad that a young disaffected voter is more likely to listen to Russell Brand than Rupert Murdoch or Paul Dacre’s minions. It just is. And it is a good thing not a bad thing. Because it means old corrupt power structures are breaking down. That is why they rage ever louder, their growing impotence clearer with every howling shriek.

Russell Brand won’t decide the outcome of the election. The politicians will, by what they say and do, and above all the public will, by what they make of what the politicians say and do. It is why I suspect a nation groaned today as we heard or read that David Cameron would pass a law to keep him to his promises on tax. If ever there was a way to signal he broke them last time, he just did it. He has fought without doubt the worst campaign I can recall and it seems to get worse day by day. He didn’t deserve to win in 2010 and deserves it even less now.

And how predictable was his reaction on hearing Miliband had met Brand? ‘Brand is a joke and Miliband is a joke for seeing him.’ Whereas seeing Jeremy Clarkson or Katie Hopkins, or putting Karren Brady in the Lords to preside over half-baked small business PR stunts, or making Z-list celebs a ‘czar’ for this or a ‘czar’ for that, or sending best wishes to Tim Sherwood when he is made manager of phoney Dave’s claret and blue ‘team,’ that is all fine.

I have no idea, beyond what Ed has told me and what I have seen trailed, how the Brand interview will come out. But a few things I can be sure of. The Sun, Mail etc will rubbish it. More people will watch it than will watch any of the 24 hour news coverage that rolls like a lifeless blancmange over our TV screens from morning to night, and for every person who buys the Sun-Mail line and asks ‘why on earth is Miliband talking to that clown?’ a lot more will say ‘good on him,’ and think that the whole thing was good for Ed, good for Brand and good for politics.

As for the idea that it sets Brand up as some kind of serious commentator on politics, he already was. That is why it is Cameron, Murdoch and Dacre who are the jokes here, not Brand and certainly not Miliband.

Vote Labour and get this man, the worst and least strategic PM of our lifetime, out. Days to go. Can’t wait.